SCGRG Early Career Events

With the success of our SCGRG Early Career Event Series in the last academic year, we are thrilled to announce the first event in our Early Career Event Series: Language and the city: Thinking through Jiehebu, with Dr Yimin Zhao, who will share their recent research and career development experience. 

In the Q&A audiences can interact with our guest to explore the event topic with tips on (early) career development, especially friendly to colleagues new to our event series and planning their research projects and/or career development.

12.00 – 12.40 GMT 13 November ONLINE

Registration: https://forms.office.com/r/atR8W6Z9FW


In this talk, Yimin will first revisit previous reflections on the “translational turn” through the Jiehebu case in Beijing, and summarise why and how our attention to the vernacular names of urban spatialities are with theoretical and epistemological significance. Instead of appealing to “ambiguous markers,” often and mainly written in English, Yimin would like to highlight the meaning of vernacular terms in doing critical urban studies – and human geography more broadly. Yimin shows that we should rethink exteriority and otherness and “shape individual and collective dispositions to acknowledge the claims of others” (Barnett 2005: 5). In this regard, language embodied in the vernacular terms should be foregrounded in decolonial endeavours as a key aspect of (rethinking) subjectivity – and being.

Yimin Zhao is Assistant Professor in Department of Geography, Durham University. His research focuses on urban periphery and the state in China and East Asia, particularly through the analytical lenses of language, materiality and everyday life. After previous investigations of Beijing’s green belts and the Jiehebu area, his current research develops along two lines of inquiry, one attending to the infrastructural lives of authoritarianism and the other looking into the urban mechanisms of “Global China.” He is an editor of City, and a corresponding editor of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.